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Gary Illyes from Google commented on how some publishers are getting insane traffic from Google Discover, the feature where Google shows articles from publishers on its Google.com home page. Gary said on Twitter "I just hope people realize that this may go away overnight and they don't build their whole business model around it."
Clearly what Gary is saying is that Google is constantly building new things and shutting down old things. If you build your business around one new Google feature and Google decides to do away with that feature, then you will be in a tough position. You need to make sure to diversify your traffic and your business so it is not reliant on a single source of traffic.
Here are the tweets:
I just hope people realize that this may go away overnight and they don't build their whole business model around it 😳
— Gary "鯨理／경리" Illyes (@methode) November 8, 2019
Google Discover is not a consistent form of traffic for most publishers, so at least that is a good thing in terms of publishers already knowing this. But if some depend on it to drive a lot of traffic to their site, then they should really look to diversify that.
You don't always see Googlers saying something specific like this about a Google service.
I don't think Google Discover is going away tomorrow. Google invested a lot into Search Console features around it. But will it be around in a few years from now? I don't think anyone knows.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: I misunderstood Gary, although, I do believe Google can pull Discover in a few years. They've pulled more or just as important features over the years. Either way, Discover traffic is very up and down in general:
.@suzukik understood what i meant. Barry took a leap of faith. https://t.co/bKhso9vy2j
— Gary "鯨理／경리" Illyes (@methode) November 12, 2019
